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Barton Swaim's column would be laughable were it not for the fact that it exemplifies the revisionist, myopic thought (I use that last word in the broadest sense) processes that are slowly coalescing to erode the underpinnings of our political system.

According to Swaim's thesis, the “ire” of those who later came to make up the Tea Party had been silently building for years under the excesses of the Bush presidency (presumably unfunded war, prescription drug entitlement, Stimulus Act of 2008), but reached a breaking point with the stimulus bill put forward by Barack Obama in 2009. "The Tea Partiers... just couldn't take it anymore." My favorite line: "Unlike George W. Bush, Barack Obama was elected precisely because he promised to encourage these trends, not simply tolerate them." Perhaps never in the history of the City Paper has such an artful turn of phrase been called upon to justify hypocrisy.

According to B.S., that second stimulus bill of 2009 (made all the more urgent by the fact that the 2008 bill had virtually no remedial effect) was the tipping point that set the Tea Party upon its rendezvous with history. Evidence that the Tea Party’s sudden rise had anything to do with race is “exceedingly thin”, despite the well-documented racist demonstrations staged by incipient Tea Partiers during the 2008 presidential campaign, and despite the efforts of elements within that group to portray Obama as a shadowy foreign agent provocateur who had surreptitiously emerged from post-colonial Africa to subvert American democracy. "Their ire had been building for years", but they waited until after the 2008 election, with the stimulus as a catalyst, to accuse the president of being an enemy of the state out to destroy the American way of life. These lunatic ravings were in fact strong enough to propel the clown car that was Donald Trump’s candidacy for a number of months leading up to the 2012 presidential election.

How supremely ironic, therefore, that it is the Republican Party, emboldened by the Tea Party fanatics and its own shortsighted self-righteousness, that has brought about the potentially fatal corruption of our Democracy by opening the floodgates to billions of dollars of special interest money.